


victor victorious

by winterbones



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Pre-Series, Too many feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-26
Updated: 2014-06-18
Packaged: 2018-01-02 16:53:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1059259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winterbones/pseuds/winterbones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>give em what they want, and don't forget to smile</p><p>      alternatively, panem values children not childhood</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. slaughter my fatten calf for the prodigal son is returned

"Did you love Annie right away, Finnick?" I ask.  
"No." A long time passes before he adds, "She crept up on me."           
        - _Mockingjay_

 

The night of his win, after he had finished scrubbing off caked layers of powder and makeup, Finnick had thrown up.

He hadn’t even made it to the privacy of his own damn rooms, and he hated himself so much for that. He was a _Victor_ , the youngest ever, District 4’s golden boy. And tomorrow he would go home and bask in the praise of his own district. Victor Victorious.

Why wouldn’t his hands stop shaking?

He lost the rest of his dinner over the railing around the Victor’s lounge. Heaved and wheezed, and tried not to think about poor Capitol pedestrians and their powdered wigs below. And then he _did_ , and started laughing. Somewhere in the middle of it, he started crying. And threw up again.

“Here, kid. It’ll help.”

Someone shoved cool glass into one dangling hand. Finnick lifted his chin, red-rimmed eyes meeting Haymitch Abbernathy’s, scraggily blonde hair falling sweaty and matted across his cagey face.

Not his mentor, but he didn’t want _Mags_ of all people to see him like that, so he shoved the bottle up against his lips and gulped it down. It burned down his throat, and festered in his empty stomach.

He threw that up too, but kept drinking, and drinking. Haymitch was right, it felt better, even with the hangover in the morning.

 

 

 

 

 

He didn’t have parents—not really. _Of course_ , he had parents. Down by the water. He knew them by sight, a man with his height and woman with his eyes. But they weren’t _his_ parents. The trainers had been, mother and father and brother and sister and uncle. He couldn’t remember if his home had smelt like sea salt or fish guts or if his mother liked to burn incense to obscure the smell.

When he returned home, they didn’t claim him as his own. Finnick recognized the selfless act, even if some part of him gagged on it.

Mags visited, but she hobbled and their houses were almost a mile apart. Finnick didn’t like to make her walk to the distance, and in the first few months back home he couldn’t muster the energy to loop his way around to hers.

He sat, mostly, staring at the waterfront, pretending his hands weren’t shaking. Sometimes, he drank. Like Haymitch Abbernathy from Twelve had suggested he do. Mostly he slept, with his sheets tangled around his legs and wet from his sweat.

 _Don’t think about it. You’re a damn Career. Victor Victorious_. Why hadn’t his trainers mentioned it before, the sick squelch of blood between his fingers? The sounds of crunching, the scent of piss and fear. Shouldn’t they have told him? How his skin would crawl with each touch afterward? Even Mags, who was the closest thing Finnick had to a mother, with a hand on his shoulder had made him want to vomit. The shame was in knowing she knew, that sad, pitying look when she had retracted her hand.

 

 

 

 

 

The noise downstairs made his finger inch toward the trident that he no longer had. Sold to the highest bidder. Finnick had been there for it, brimming with pride that someone would spend _so much_ on something he had used.

Then he had remembered—what it had felt like to push his trident through gristle and bone and feel the hot splatter of blood. He had left before the money had changed hands.

In the incandescent lights, his scars hadn’t seemed so jagged and terrible. He had bathed in the glow, how the Capitol had cried out for him. Like he was some sort of golden Messiah. _The youngest victor who ever lived. The boy with the trident._

Away from it, he remembered a young girl’s face—from Five, he thought maybe—smashed in with a bloody rock. Before he’d picked up the trident, he’d mostly had only his hands. He’d felt a boy’s neck, District Six, break beneath his ruthless twist.

He’d drink, the way Haymitch Abbernathy did, but Mags knew the man and Finnick didn’t really want to get him in trouble.

He crept silently down the spartan hall of his victor house, feeling half a fugitive in it. How whacked was that? But he paid for this with blood and screams and guts, and none his own. He felt like a thief.

The old woman only looked mildly alarmed to see him hulking in the threshold of the kitchen, her brown eyes popping wide enough to consume her entire face. A slip of a girl clung to her skirts.

“Mags was right,” the woman said at least, “you do need someone making sure you’re eating decent meals.”

Finnick, who was sometimes fourteen and not a Victor, just lifted his shoulder in a defensive roll. Cooking hadn’t been on the training regiment, so what?

“Marianne Cresta,” the old woman said. She wasn’t as old as Mags, who was old as dirt, but she was somewhere in the ballpark. Her snowy white hair glowed in the bronze morning. “And this is—”

He knew who she was, and he knew who the tiny thing pressed to her side was. Everyone knew who she was. There wasn’t much room for charity in any district, but the girl had a way of worming into your heart—skinny knock-knees and a tangled wreath of salt-crusted hair. She was too young to work, but collected seashalls and lightning struck sand and made jewelry out of them. Everyone tried to buy a piece now and again.

Finnick never had.

“Lo, Annie Cresta,” he said, and smiled. A pure Capitol smile, the one his team had taught him. All teeth, white and straight, and no meaning. _Give the crowds what they want, Finnick. Show them how handsome you’re going to be._

She lifted seaweed green eyes to him, half-obscured by her frizzy tangles of hair. Her face was angular and not-quite lovely, but there was something nice in the way her mouth was wide and her eyes were too big for her face. Her slender fingers gripped her grandmother’s gnarled ones tightly.

“Hello, Finnick Odair,” she said.

 

 

 

 

 

They kept coming around, and Finnick was surprised to find he liked having them. They filled up the empty gaps in his house, with noise and tutting—mostly Marianne—with grubby little fingers on his glassware—mostly Annie.

Usually it was just Marianne who kept him company, but Annie would stop by sometimes in the afternoon after school.

Mostly she just made more of a mess. She never brushed her hair. Finnick was used to being groomed, clothes always neat and his hair carefully tussled. Sometimes he would just stare at the messy knots down her back, wondering how one could possibly untangle that snarl.

She caught him looking some times, and wrinkled her nose. There were an extra smudge of dirt on his glass door to the porch those days.

He’d leave them there.

 

 

 

 

 

His Victory tour was a mess. He spent most of it in an alcohol-laced haze after Twelve, and Haymitch had caught him bent-over a wastebasket. The liquor was still cheap, and burned an acidic trail down his stomach lining, but Finnick never missed a line. Finnick _never_ missed a line. It was a talent.

In Eight he thought about morphling. He wasn’t sure what stopped him. Alcohol made him numb, but the drugs were something else altogether. Maybe he was afraid of the attached hallucination. He wouldn’t be seeing anything good, he knew that.

It was easier in the Capitol. He shed his skin like a snake and became someone else. The golden boy from Four, just like they wanted. He smiled and waved, and danced and everyone was amazed at how light on his feet his was. Fingers brushed over his shoulders. He didn’t throw up.

 

 

 

 

 

Coming home was hard. Sweat broke out in pinpricks along the backs of his knees, at his elbows. His legs wouldn’t stop bouncing, as if the vibrations of the moving train were shaking him. Except you couldn’t _feel_ the vibrations of the train.

His escort preened over how well everything had gone, how much everyone just unabashedly loved him. Finnick tried to remember enjoying the Capitol, and the way the champagne had tingled his lips. He couldn’t. He only remembered the food now, tasting like ash. He wanted to throw up, but forced himself to stay pressed into the cushions. Forced himself to smile at his escort.

Mags hadn’t come on this trip. Her leg had been giving her problems, and it was best that she stay behind. He had clung to her hand getting on the train, and had wished with every fiber of his being that she could come.

Now, thinking about Capitol Finnick and his wild, sun-kissed hair, he was glad she hadn’t.

There was a whole crowd of people waiting for him, pushing and shoving for just a look, their fingers reaching for him. If not for his escort’s hand at the small of his back, Finnick didn’t know if he’d have gotten off the train.

 _They love me_ , he thought. He could see it in their faces, weathered by the shore. Love and admiration and adoration, waves after waves of it. All for him. Only for him. For their Victor Victorious.

Why wouldn’t his hands stop shaking?

Marianne and Annie Cresta were waiting for him along the road to the Victor’s Village. Annie’s hair resembled something close to brushed today, only the ends of it twisted into tight knots.

He wondered why he felt a muscle in his jaw tick.

Her yellow dress, dotted with white flowers, and faded in places, eaten at by time, swished around her knobby-knees.

“Hello, Finnick Odair,” she said.

His smile was tired, barely edging up over his mouth. But it was a real one.

“Lo, Annie Cresta,” he said.

 

 

 

 

 

The first time—he was sixteen.

The man had a smiling face and tight palms, and they dug into Finnick’s cheek.

Finnick was back in the arena, but this time he was going to lose.

 

 

 

 

He came again, but the edges of it were no longer smooth. They poked into his ribs, left puncture holes.

“Hello, Finnick Odair,” Annie said when he clomped up his porch. Thirteen did not set well on her, her face narrowing even harsh angles not yet smoothed out, and her hair to seemed to curl into protest of age. Finnick thought she might not ever be pretty, and envied her for it.

Her smile made him think of the man, hands on Finnick’s waist and further down, stroking with slimy appreciation. He wondered if Annie could see it in his face, what had happened. If he bore a brand about it somehow, a mark that detonated him.

He said nothing. He walked passed her into the house, and closed the door.

 

 

 

 

 

She took to leaving little things around his house, though she stopped speaking to him. Finnick spent a good chunk of time complementing the empty places where her voice had been.

A ball of glass here, bright blue waters on a sunny morning. A seashell shell bracelet left to dangle on an end table. Star dollars dried and bleached stacked on his kitchen counter. The seashell necklace, the last gift, was brightly polished enough to shimmer, and he tried not to image Annie fingers around a blade, making the hollowed spaces inside the seashell. The idea of her pale, bony fingers around a knife made him sick.

It hung from a bright blue thread, knotted and braided over and over again to give it sturdy thickness. It reminded Finnick of Annie’s hair, always so tangled in intricate knots. He spent a long time running his fingers over the thread, feeling the coarseness.

He wore it around his neck the next time he went to the Capitol, and when the woman leaned over him, crushed her body into his, the pointed end dug into his heart. It reminded him to breathe, and put him somewhere else. He was back in Four, and Annie was leaving smudge marks on his glass, and he was laughing—her was chasing he down his back porch out to the beach, where the waves crashed against the side. He was diving headlong into the curl of white foam, salt scrapping his skin clean, and Annie’s fingers were dragging his head over the break. Keeping him afloat.

When he crawled out of the bed, the woman’s arms draped over him and clinging, he noticed the necklace had left its indent on his right breast.

 

 

 

 

Sometimes, Finnick thought about saying no. Just no. Just for one night. Just getting up and leaving, going back to Four.

Johanna Mason didn’t scream at her parents’ funerals, but the way the muscles in her jaw bunch and retract, she might as well have. But still—she crowed there was a kind of freedom in it, too. Putting them in the ground. She never came back to the Capitol, except during the Games.

Finnick wanted that freedom too, irreverent and loud and brash and mean, like Johanna. He didn’t want to smile, mostly. His jaw _ached_ from the strain.

But the necklace is cold against his skin and reminder that Snow, and the Capitol, could find something to take away from him. Things Finnick didn’t even know he could lose.

 

 

 

 

 

“It’s not my place,” Mags began. She mumbled most of the time, a stroke a few years ago just before Finnick’s Game, but Finnick had learned to tune into her words, slurred at they were.

He snorted. “Never stopped you before.”

Her hand is surprisingly strong for her old age and swatted at the back of his head.

“But Annie Cresta—”

Finnick had been practicing his fishhooks. He wasn’t good at it, like Mags, fingers fumbling over the delicate task. He dropped it to the wood planks of his with a sought _tink_.

Mags was undaunted. “Don’t have her keep coming around if you’re just going to avoid her all day.”

“Technically, I _didn’t_. Invite her. That was you.”

Mags swatted him again. “Respect your elders.” Her hand smoothed down his hair. “She’s almost fifteen, and still comes around. You know—how people talk.”

Oh yes, he knew. They talked about him all the time. He heard them, behind their hands. _Capitol whore_. Golden Boy Finnick Odair and his endless stream of Capitol lovers, with their towering hairs and rainbow colors. Too good for Four, now, always spending every chance he had in the Capitol. Preening like a peacock.

“Oh—oh—Finnick—oh—”

He hadn’t realized that Mags had put her wrinkled arms around his shoulders. He hadn’t realized he’d started crying.

 

 

 

 

 

He left the ball of glass and the seashell bracelet and the sand dollar in a basket Mags had woven on the kitchen table with a little card in his scrawling handwriting that said _these are yours_. He watched from his window as Annie walked away from his house, the basket tucked under her arm, her knotted hair slapping against her back.

He kept the necklace, a selfish and needy gesture.

Annie stopped coming by with her grandmother.

 

 

 

 

 

Marianne Cresta died, as old people do. She had told Finnick as much, made him a reluctant secret keeping to her end. He knew what she had been thinking when she told him how her heart skipped beats, and not because she kept seeing his pretty face. She had thought— _well here’s a man who’s killed his fair share. What’s one more death?_

He let her. Marianne never talked to him about Annie, and he figured he owed her.

He took Mags to the funeral, hold her trembling hand. He wondered if Mags was afraid suddenly of her own immortality, but Mags had never been afraid of anything and Finnick figured she must have wept for her friend. They were two of the oldest in Four, born before the Hunger Games even.

There was a warm summer rain, sluicing down his white, open shirt. He noticed Annie standing near the casket, done up in black. The dress was new, the first one she had bought for herself in years probably, but Finnick had paid for the funeral. They weren’t common in Four, but he could afford it and more. And he owed Marianne, for sniffing at a fourteen year old boy who trembled at the loudest sound.

There was another boy close to her elbow, one hand curled around wrist. A protective gesture. Finnick ignored it, and the boy, and approached her.

“Lo, Annie Cresta,” he said.

The rain had loosened the knots in her hair. Funny how he wanted to reknot them for her.

“Hello, Finnick Odair,” she said.

 

 

 

 

 

The next morning he found her in his kitchen, unannounced. He blinked at her. She blinked at him. He realized like a kick to his gut that Annie was almost sixteen now, and where thirteen hadn’t sat right for her, almost-sixteen _did_. The narrowness of her face accentuated the oval of her eyes, her pale skin a sharp contrast to her dark lashes. She was small, but no longer gaunt. More a wood nymph than a starved girl from Four.

“Hello, Finnick Odair,” she said.

His fingers itched to untangle the knots of her hair and retangle them. He thought of her svelte from naked and trembling on his kitchen table, her wide mouth pulled back into a small cry. He imaged her slender fingers in the sweep of his hair, pulling roughly.

He hated himself.

“Lo, Annie Cresta.” And he was selfish. He swallowed. “Mind telling me how you got a key?” He forced a smiled, Capitol white and toothy. Golden Boy Finnick Odair.

Annie merely smile, her quiet smile, like she was in on a secret no one else new. “Marianne had one. Just because she’s gone doesn’t mean you’re allowed to ruin all her hard work.”

“This mean you want the job?” He leaned forward on his elbow, all charm and wit. If he pretended she was just another Capitol girl, then he wouldn’t want her in ways he knew he shouldn’t.

“Someone has to do it,” she pointed out.

 

 

 

 

 

From his window he watched Annie clomp up the steps to his porch. Her tangled hair was pulled back into a ponytail today, and she wasn’t alone.

“Come on, Annie!” the boy called after her, trailing behind her. Finnick had seen him at the funeral, at Annie’s elbow. He didn’t know his name, but Finnick decided for reasons unknown he didn’t much for the gawky, angular kid. “Let’s go to the beach, just for the day!”

Finnick wondered what Annie looked like, stretched out like a cat in the sun. He wondered how she kept her skin was pale, when she spent so long in the sun.

Annie waved at her companion. “Maybe tomorrow!” and disappeared into his house.

Finnick went down to meet her.

 

 

 

 

 

“It is true?” Annie asked once, rolling her fingers along his countertop.

Finnick was working on a braid of rope, because Annie had laughed when she found out he didn’t know how. _Did your Career trainer teach you_ anything _useful_? she had demanded. She had shown him how to knot an anchor bend, and then unknotted it for him to try.

He was trying now, tongue caught between his teeth. Not really concentrated on her. His reply was an absent him, “Hmm?”

“About what you do in the Capitol.”

Everything stilled—the clock, Annie’s fingers on the countertop, _his_ on the rope. Finnick thought maybe his heart stopped too, pressed against his ribs and punctured.

“What.”

“I just want—I wanted to know—well, everyone says—”

Finnick hated, that those thoughts could invade, _here_. Groping, sweaty hands and thick moans and bodies pressed into his own. Hated them because she was here, and could be touched by them. Even know, they were trailing their fingertips through her gnarled hair.

His fist slammed into the counter. He had no gilded words to distract her. Only anger. “Let it _go_ , Annie.”

“But are those—are they—the kind of girls— _women_ who—”

_“Let it go.”_

She ran, and took all the air with her.

 

 

 

 

 

Annie stayed away for almost a week, and Finnick thought he would go mad. He had to go back to the Capitol soon, another client to pay for his time in secrets. Somehow he didn’t want to leave without knowing if she was angry or not at him.

She appeared on his porch, and Finnick hated it, but his eyes were locked on the way her lips were swollen and trembled.

“Lo, Annie Cresta,” he managed.

“Hello, Finnick Odair,” she said, and her voice warbled oddly. “I had my first kiss.”

He’d had his first kiss at sixteen, too.

He left the next day.

 

 

 

 

 

In the opulent hotel room, with a chandelier dangling and bouncing crystalline lights along the walls, Finnick curled his hands around the woman’s wrists, and pulled away. She stared at him in open-mouthed shock.

The necklace he always wore, that sometimes felt he had been born wearing, but really it was only a few years old, poked into his chest.

“Sorry, but I don’t want to.”

He stood and walked out of the room.

 

 

 

 

 

President Snow was terrifying in his quietness, in his civility. Finnick didn’t like roses for this very reason, and tried to remember how salt smelled when it was on the breeze. How it tangled in Annie’s hair so it knotted.

“I’m not angry,” President Snow said after a moment. His lips barely moved beneath his snowy beard. “I’m disappointed.”

Somehow, Finnick knew that was worse.

 

 

 

 

 

“ _Annie Cresta!_ ” the Capitol escort said, unshaking fingers holding the slip of white paper aloft.

Yes. It was worse.


	2. crown my girl with laurel wreaths

So that's who Finnick loves, I think. Not his string of fancy lovers in the Capitol. But a poor, mad girl back home           
        - _Catching Fire_  
  
  


“Hello, Finnick Odair.”

Everything hurt. Like breathing. Finnick’s lungs felt like he had been held under water five minutes too long and they had forgotten how to process air. She sat in a brown chair in the Justice Building, her back to the sea, knees to her chest. Her skirt was new, and starchily pressed, a single crease down its side. Shapeless, it clung to her legs like a dull burlap sack. Her hair spilled like ropes over her arms.

“Lo, Annie Cresta,” he said, and dropped to his knees.

She was seventeen, he thought, and beautiful.

 

 

 

 

 

Finnick recognized Annie’s District partner, though it took him a minute. Not a Career, like he had assumed, because the boy had volunteered. It was the boy at the funeral, holding Annie’s elbow, and it was the boy who had tried to coax her away from Finnick’s porch.

His records showed that he was only two weeks away from eighteen, almost safe. Six years, and he had avoided the chopping block, only to stretch out his own neck in offering in the home stretch.

 _Stupid kid_ , Finnick thought, and felt a pang of envy. No one had ever loved him enough to volunteer in his place, _he’d_ never loved anyone enough to volunteer, either. He’d been a _Career_ —trained to kill, trained to sate the Capitol’s bloodlust, and if all else failed _trained to die_. He’d never gone to school and sat behind a girl with knotted, dark hair that tangled down her back. He’d never fallen in love with her shy smiles and seaweed green eyes, her quiet way of speaking, as if she wanted to make sure each word counted. He’d never had her soft fingers, strong from hard work, on the back of his neck or felt her wide mouth press gently to his.

Finnick Odair had never been in love.

He was nearly crippled with jealousy.

“Why did you do it?” he can hear Annie demand, hovering just beyond the door’s sensor. Her voice warbled at the edges of its words. “Erik, you would have been eighteen in _fourteen days_. Erik, how could you—why would you?”

“Annie. Annie. I love you.”

She started weeping.

Finnick walked away.

 

 

 

 

 

Normally, he mentored the boys, and Mags took the girls. Mags always ribbed him about it. _Too pretty for anyone to concentrate_ , and he’d laugh because well—he was _too pretty_. He was 18-karats, and diamond-encrusted. He was a golden trident, the most experience gift in the Games. 

He and Mags traded places, quietly and without acknowledge meant. It felt wrong, to be around Erik. To be around Erik and hoped that he died, because if he died that meant Annie might win.

Annie was quiet, from the train to the Capitol, the only movement she made was to lean forward on the couch and peer into the crush of the cheering crowds that awaited their arrival. Finnick’s stomach rolled and pitched.

“They’re calling for you,” Annie observed, but there was no bitterness in her tone.

He came up behind her, slipped a hand along her knotted hair, and rested a wide, bronze palm on the top of her head. Finnick Odair, Golden Boy of the Capitol, with his hand cupped around the little slip of girl from Four destined to die. That had to mean something, didn’t it?

Why wouldn’t his hands stop shaking?

 

 

 

 

 

Annie lost two inches of hair, where her knots had been brushed down and refused to be untangled. The curls down her back were artifice, styled, meant to invoke the rolls and waves of the sea. Green dust glittered beneath the sweep of her dark lashes, her nails tipped a teal. Her dress slithered around her nubile form, rippling and shifting, the same green of her eyes. There were streaks of a dark blue in her hair.

She was the sea.

She wasn’t Annie.

She sat on the leather couch, knees drawn to her chest again, staring down wide-eyed and awestruck into the glowing facets of the Capitol below them. They were so high up. It had given Finnick vertigo the first time he had been here, but Annie only seemed amazed.

Her shoulders rolled. “Finnick, are you playing with my hair?”

He made a noncommittal noise.

She shifted, and the ropy strands of her dark hair slipped like water through his fingertips. She swung it into her palms, rolling her thick curls between her fingers. “You knotted it,” she accused.

“Something was missing,” he told her, and managed to crack a smile.

 

 

 

 

 

Annie went to training, and Finnick went to work. President Snow already had a line of clients waiting for him, an insulting punishment because he was Annie Cresta’s mentor and all he should be doing in the week before the Games was preparing _her_. But he knew better than to say no this time.

They paid him in secrets, his clients. President Snow saw only the wealth, but Finnick knew his chattel was more valuable. He knew things no one else would, or could, and stored them inside his chest, hooks and knives ruminating with power that he didn’t know how to use, how to wield. So he let them fester. Perhaps they serve a purpose in time.

But Finnick’s required payment became something more solid this time around.

“A lovely girl,” he said, when Annie’s image would flicker across their screens. He pretended that she wasn’t _Annie_ , her hair pulled into a bun on top of her head and her mouth turned down. “From my district. _Very_ much like me.”

When he cast a sidelong glance, the look in their eyes made him sick. Thinking of Annie like they thought of him, but it was worth it.

 

 

 

 

 

Annie came home with bruises coloring her wrists, but a fire in her eyes. She showed how she could balance a dagger on the tip of her finger.

“I have a natural talent,” she said, wetting her lips. Finnick looked at anywhere but her. “I’m nowhere as good as you, Finnick Odair, but—”

“Stop,” he said, fist cracking down on the glass table. Erik jumped, their escort yelped. “You’re better than me.”

Her wide eyes were the color of the sea at dusk, deep green, and Finnick wanted to weep. He swallowed his mussel, and it tasted like ash and coagulated blood. It was supposed to be a _delicacy of Four_ , but it only tasted like rot.

 

 

 

 

 

Two more days.

“Why are you so mad at me?” Annie demanded. Even her rage wasn’t loud, it was a quiet, seething thing. Festering like a wounded. The churn of a ripetide beneath the stagnant surface of water.

He stared at her, hair mussed from questing fingers, heady perfume and liquor hazing his senses. Finnick had tried to sneak in as quietly as he could, and he could be very quiet. He didn’t want Annie to see him like this, lipstick stains on the color of his white shirt. Her necklace dangled from his neck, and slapped against his chest.

He stared at her. The iridescent lights dripped multicolored hues into the reknotted coils of her hair, like the woven thread that held his necklace.

“I’m not—how can you think—I’m _not_ angry at you, Annie.” Finnick could talk his way out of anything, and everything. He had the Capitol eating at out of his hand, with shark-sharp smiles and curled fingers. But staring at her, he felt blood in his lungs, a knife in his gut.

“Then will you stop looking at me like I’m _already_ dead?” she snarled, voice pitched low. The darkness around them was low and warm. He could feel the compression of it on his skin. “I know I’m going to die. I just don’t want _you_ , of all people, to look at me like I’m already a corpse.”

“Annie—”

Her hand shot out, crashed into his chest. He felt the poke of his necklace into the side of her fist.

“That’s _mine_ ,” Annie said.

Finnick had the ridiculous urge to tell her— _no it’s mine_.

“I mean. I made it. For you.” Her palm flattened, so the pendent rested in the center of her palm. “I thought you’d lost it, when it wasn’t in the basket. You kept it?”

When she lifted her eyes, Finnick can see the gloss of tears in her eyes, like diamonds set at the corners of her eyes. His fingers move to her cheeks.

She ran, and left him in the dark.

 

 

 

 

 

One day.

Finnick didn’t watch Annie’s interview. She had practiced it over and over again, but both he and her escort knew—she was too quiet, too muted, not flashy enough to gain any sort of real attention. She had scored a solid 7 in assessment, but that really wasn’t enough.

He already knew how her interview was going to go. Caesar Flickerman would make her regale his audience of tales of _what was it like to have Finnick Odair as your mentor?_

She and Erik came back and quietly ascended the stairs to the rooms, without speaking. Finnick drank until he forgot his own name. He somehow managed to stumble up into his room, and fell asleep on his stomach, empty bottle dangling from his fingers and head hanging over the side of the bed.

Then there were fingers in his hair.

“Finnick—”

He groaned. The sound of the water lapping against rocks on a lazy morning disturbed his stupor. He rolled over and ignored it.

The fingers in his hairs tightened.

“ _Finnick_.”

He floundered awake, grappling in his sheets for the trident that was no longer there. He sucked in mouthfuls of airs, like he had just broken the surface of the water.

Annie looked at him, and in the dark her eyes were wet and luminous.

 

 

 

 

 

She said, “I don’t want to die without—”

His hands on her cheeks stopped her. He _knew_. Somewhere between the moment she had been cowering behind her grandmother, and this moment here in his darkened bedroom he had learned the ins and outs of her. He knew her better than he knew himself.

Finnick didn’t know himself, buried beneath Capitol gloss. But he knew Annie Cresta.

And he kissed her, mouth sliding open and wide beneath hers. She squeaked into his mouth, tasting fresh and sweet. Her fingers settled on the naked expanse of his arms, and for once Finnick didn’t feel disgusted by the touch. He wanted her hands on him. The first time he felt _good_ having someone’s hands pressed into him.

The sounds she made was something between a gasp and a pant, and he dragged her onto his bed and slid her beneath him. Her fingers tugged restlessly at her hands, and it was an easy matter to remove the little sleep shirt she was wearing—and he had crawled into his bed all but naked after a shower.

She didn’t want to die without knowing what this felt like, was what she had meant.

He didn’t want her to _die_.

Finnick put his head between her legs, tongue moving inside her, stealing the taste her, trying to hoard her unique flavor. She smelled like the sea, and the home, and tasted tangy on his lips. Anne bowed beneath him, legs moving clenching around his hand. He pressed a thumb to the back of a knee, another to her clit, take pleasuring in causing pleasure for the first time in his memories. Whatever he gave her, Annie gave back tenfold.

He could have been just content to go on like that all night, speaking his tongue into her, and would have if Annie had tugged at his shoulders, dragged her over her. He dipped his tongue into her mouth, and poured the rich taste of her arousal into her, and she reached between them to cup him. His skin didn’t crawl, he only gasped into her mouth, hips snapping.

The analogy was a poor one, but it was like a sea-battered ship being pulled into a safe harbor. Finnick slipped inside her, her legs wrapped around her waist. Pan flashed across her shadowed face, and he kissed the jut of her lower lip in apology, but she was gripping his hips, urging him to move and he did. Gentle, rocking back and forth inside her. There was no hurry to find release, or to let her find release. There was no need to be free of her, as quickly as possible. He wanted this forever.

When he did come, he panted into her trembling clavicle, gripping her so hard he worried he might leave an indent on her bones. Her nails had left crescent-moon holes in his shoulders, and he could feel the burn of them. The sweat from their skin fused them together as it dried.

For the first time since Finnick had been pulled out of his Game, he felt _alive_.

 

 

 

 

 

In the moments before dawn, spooned around her, one arm thrown over her chest so their fingers could twine, Finnick allowed himself to imagine.

—a different time, and a different place. He was never reaped, was never Career, was just a dock-boy down by the water that pulled in the daily haul with his father. He grew bronze under the watchful gaze of the water, not his trainers. His spear only ever impaled fish.

—he saw her down the beach one day, collecting lightning-struck sand. He was intrigued by the way her hair caught the sun, and made it look like it was on fire from the distance. He didn’t see her for a while, after that, but everyone knew who _Annie Cresta_ was, and he kept an eye out for her.

Finnick could see the expanse of sunlight creeping his window, and had never hated the day more. The day had always been his sanctuary. His nights belonged to the Capitol, and the unwanted fingers pressing into him, but the day was him.

He cursed it.

—He got brave and bought a necklace from her. His smiles were shy and unpracticed, every inch the boy experiencing his first crush. She looked at him from underneath the sweep of her lashes, and her fingers lingered one second to long in his palm as she handed over her piece of jewelry.

Annie made a fretful sound, and Finnick stroked a wide, bronzed hand down her hair.

—He invited her onto his father’s boat one lazy afternoon. He watched the rays of sunlight play molten gold in her hair.

—He made love to her the first time into a little cove guarded by an outcropping of rocks, but he already knew he was going to spend the rest of his life with this girl. He asked her to marry her two days later.

The sunlight tangled in Annie’s lashes, and her eyes fluttered open. Her lips pared, and then twisted into a grimace. Their time was up.

—and their first child is reaped at fourteen.

Finnick rolled away.

“I should go back to my room.”

He threw a hand over his eyes, unable to look at her.

Her fingers moved over his arm, curling. He felt her mouth near his ear. “I love you, Finnick Odair. I needed to say it just once.”

She was gone before he remembered how to breathe.

 

 

 

 

 

She and Erik ran. They had no chance at the Cornucopia, and so they ran. Erik, with his hand curled around Annie’s wrist, and Annie stumbling behind him, hair piled into a severe topknot. A backpack she had grabbed in their mad dash to the woods trailed behind her.

A large, manmade lake rested at the outmost left of the arena, tiny island filled with more woodlands dotting it. Annie and Erik cut through the water with ease, dolphin kicking their way to safety. They couldn’t climb trees well, but they could hide.

But they couldn’t hid forever.

 

 

 

 

 

“ _Annie, run_!” Erik was slammed first-face into a rock, and his body twitched and stilled. Blood seeped out from where he laid in the dirt, but his sides moved unevenly as he sucked in a breath.

Annie almost did, feet tap-dancing nervous against the mossy ground. Finnick watched as her face turned toward the water, toward salvation. To her right, Erik groaned wetly.

She turned back, and sealed her own fate.

Finnick hadn’t realized he had hurtled his bottle of liquor across the room until Haymitch yelped. Amber fluid rolled down the wall, and then were arms encircling, bear-hugging him nearly enough to break his ribs. He tried to buck Haymitch off. The back of his skull reared and slammed into his jaw.

“Calm the fuck down,” Haymitch hissed into his ear, and Finnick realized he’d been screaming. “Just _calm_ the fuck down. You’re not going to help them like this.”

Haymitch had never been a good liar, Finnick thought bitterly as he was born to the ground. There _was_ no help for them.

 

 

 

 

 

The Careers made Annie watch, one of the bigger ones squatted on her chest, as they hacked into Erik. A finger first, so the pain woke him. He screamed when they took the next, and when they caught off an ear, and again when they gorged out an eye. He screamed and screamed until they broke his jaw, and turned them into wet, sick gurgles.

 _I’m a Career. I’m just like them_ , Finnick thought, slumped forward on the couch. The violence didn’t sicken him, only knowing Annie was being forced to watch did.

Erik kept his good eye on Annie, bloody hand reaching for her as she thrashed beneath her capture. He never closed his eyes, never broke that contact, not even when the Career from One began to press her machete into his neck did he looked away from Annie. The eye contact was only broken when the Career from One severed his head completely and kicked it from his body.

Finnick heaved, emptying the contents of his stomach over his pants, but didn’t dare look away from Annie.

The Career on top of her shifted to reach for his weapon. Annie screamed, and reared forward. Her little dagger slammed into his throat, sending sticky blood and gristle rolling down her knuckles. 

And Finnick Odair realized he loved Annie Cresta.

She kicked free of him, shoving him into his companions and made a break for the water. She dove headfirst, and once she was in the water there was no catching her.

 

 

 

 

 

And Annie Cresta _ran_. And ran. And ran. Finnick was running with her, his heart pounding so hard in his chest he thought it would bruise his ribs. His heart raced as fast she ran, streaking through the trees and slushing through the air.

Annie said nothing, made no a sound, her lips pressed so tightly together they turned bloodless and blended into the angle of her jaw.

She ran.

She ran and never stopped, arms pressed tight to her sides to decrease wind resistance. Finnick had no idea where she was running to, and a sinking sensation told him she didn’t either.

Annie was still running when the dam broke.

And then she was swimming.

 

 

 

 

 

It took three days for the rest to die, giving into their own exhaustion and letting the water close over their heads. Finnick tried to imagine what that was like, the inky black water circling around the, the sun becoming a pinprick. And then only darkness.

Annie dogpaddled, and then she just floated. No one tried to hurt her. No one tried to hurt anyone. The Careers and the few remaining Tributes died whimpering and crying in fear.

The last canon fired just as Annie’s head disappeared under the water. She didn’t move as she was plucked out of the arena, waterlogged and shaking.

Victor Victorious.

 

 

 

 

 

The first time Finnick could see Annie again her hair was brushed, a silky shine of rich, brown waves. His stomach twisted.

“Lo, Annie Cresta,” he said, reaching out to skim his fingers over her cheeks.

She stared through him, as if he wasn’t there.

 

 

 

 

 

“A mental break,” Dr. Lenthrop said, thumb pressed into Annie’s cheekbone. Her pupils were wide, the dark swallowing the green, and she sat still and pale, unflinching beneath the beam of light the doctor shone into them.

Finnick leaned against the door, ankles crossed and arms crossed. He didn’t look like the Capitol’s Golden Boy, his lips pressed firmly over his lips into a thin, bloodless line. He could feel his blunted nails dig into the underside of his arms, the well of blood in the little hole.

“It’s not uncommon,” the doctor went on, “for tributes that aren’t Careers.”

Finnick remembered how he vomited the night after his win, shame-faced and so long ago. Annie stared blankly at the mind, lost to the storm of her own mind.

“Still—I think she’ll be fine for her interview.”

Finnick imagined throwing the doctor out of the window, imagined his graying head splattering against the cement far below. Instead, he crossed the room and carefully gathered Annie, one arm across her back and one underneath her legs.

She stared at the wall of her chest, miles away. Her eyes were not fearful, Finnick thought. Not terrified. Perhaps she went to a better place. If she had—the only thing he regretted was not being able to go with her.

He walked out of the room.

 

 

 

 

 

Annie’s interview was disastrous, walls and walls of silence and stony-faced stares out in the see of Capitol faces. A lackluster game, overall, despite the excitement of the violent death of District Four’s male tribute.

Of course, President Snow came to visit.

Just him, and Finnick and Annie. Finnick munching loudly on his own meal to fill the gaps left in by Annie’s silence. Her meal sat untouched on her porcelain plate.

“It seems Dr. Lenthrop was right. She’s not altogether here, is she?” Snow observed, lips barely moving beneath his snowy-white beard. “Unfortunate. She had been a lovely girl, and the Capitol would have enjoyed her for a Victor. But the strain was too much, was it Annie?”

He said it to her, and Finnick noted the twitch of her hand against her thigh, rabbit-nerves thumping wildly in her veins. She wanted to run, he could see it in the tic of her jaw. Run like she had in the arena. Run and hide and survive.

Finnick’s fists were clenched so tightly in his hands in knuckles were bone-white. He thought— _I could stab him, the fork could be my trident. Stab him, right in the neck, and let him bleed out all over. We could run._

It would be mean his death, but suddenly Finnick didn’t care. Annie had fled to safer shores, and he couldn’t follow. He could put his fork in President Snow’s neck and lay his body like an offering to a goddess at Annie’s feet, and go to his grave happy.

Except—Annie would die too.

“Going home will help,” Finnick said, instead. “Going home will heal her.”

“It might be best to bury her there,” Snow agreed. “No one cares about a living reminder of how… traumatizing the game can be.” He sounded like he was only talking to himself, but Finnick knew that Snow was too cunning to allow himself to think aloud. Whatever Finnick was hearing, Snow wanted him to hear it.

 _Bury her in District Four._ A coil around his heart tightened. Yes. Yes. Keep Annie out of the Capitol, and the dark specter of secret keeping he employed himself in. He couldn’t protect her from the games, couldn’t protect her even from himself, but he could keep far away from the spindly grasp of the Capitol. The shores she had escaped to were her sanctuary, but the Capitol would _break_ her.

Finnick could feel the fissures in his skin, where he had splintered himself—Capitol playboy, and Career tribute, and Finnick Odair—he had absorbed the sickness the Capitol feasted on until it became a part of him. Until he no longer knew if he was more than the sum of his parts, or just his parts.

“It would be for the best.” His voice was hoarse and low.

“Of course, it would be a loss of a valuable commodity.”

Annie’s arms rested on the glass table, overly pale despite her time in the sound. A muscle in her arm flexed.

“It wouldn’t be a problem.” Finnick pretended there wasn’t acidic bile pooled in his mouth.

“I didn’t think it would be,” Snow agreed.

Finnick thought he saw Annie’s chin angle towards him, attuned to the undercurrents of the discussions, but he was certain he must have imagined it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. so it's been a while
> 
> 2\. how have you been?
> 
> 3\. you look good
> 
> 4\. have you cut you hair? it's a good style for you
> 
> 5\. the next chapter should come out much faster


	3. my back to the shore, my face to the sea

And suddenly, it's as if there's no one in the world but these two, crashing through space to reach each other. They collide, enfold, lose their balance, and slam against a wall, where they stay. Clinging into one being. Indivisible           
        - _Mockingjay_

 

On the train ride home, he cupped her cheeks. He remembered how he had never let himself touch Annie, instilled and unspoken rules that he had set out for himself the moment he realized she was beautiful. He cannot touch beautiful things. They might call him _beautiful_ , but Finnick knew better. He was an open chest cavity, and the Capitol poured its noxious poison into him. And the plague was contagious.

But he touched her now, because Finnick was selfish before the Capitol had ever gotten their hands on him. A killer at fourteen, bred to slaughter and to die. When he saw something sweet, he had been taught to grab it quick.

And he did not know how to function in a world bereft of Annie Cresta. His body had scarred over with her firmly locked against his skin, fused to her. She had never needed him, but he needed _her_.

“Annie.” His fingers swept over her cheekbone, shifting aside a curl of hair from her lashes. “Annie, please come back to me.”

Her eyes were focused on the flashes of green in the window beyond their head.

He leaned up on the balls of his heels, mouth coasting over hers in a ghost of a kiss. She remained still as marble.

“I love you, Annie Cresta,” he murmured. “I needed to say it just once.”

 

 

 

 

 

They moved Annie into the Victor’s Village, an empty house beside Finnick’s.

Annie spent most of her time curled up on her side, knees to her chest and eyes on the sea. Sometimes her fingers moved in tandem with the waves, mimicking the crash and swells. Sometimes her lips moved, as if she was counting.

Mags sat beside her, making fishhooks, or talking to her in a voice barely heard above the sound of the water. Sometimes, Mags would string along seashells and glass-turned sand, made lovely by lightning strikes, like Annie used to, leaving them decorating Annie’s wrists and slender neck.

Finnick sat beside her on the other days.

“Look,” he murmured, eyes on the swell of waves breaking out on the horizon line, “I learned how to do the anchor knot—and you said I couldn’t. Sure showed you.” His fingers moved as deftly as hers had once had, unknotting and reknotting. Annie did not congratulate him on his success.

Some days, he liked to knot her hair. Looping and coiling the springy, chestnut hair until it hung down her back in banded braids. It was getting long again.

“I’m not going anywhere, Annie,” he would tell her, in his weakest moments. “I won’t leave you. Whenever you decided to come back, I’ll be here.”

 

 

 

 

 

His visits to the Capitol increased, and so did his popularity. They credited Annie’s win as his, and so it became more _his_ victory than hers. Finnick wanted to scream how strong Annie was, how impossible strong. _You wanted to break her, but she found a way to survive_.

But he smiled. He was charming. He imagined putting a trident through each smiling face, until he knew what their slick, hot blood felt rolling down his knuckles. They had unmade him and remade him, and now he was the Victor Victorious—fed on bloodlust and hate and hunger. Under the cover of the night, with unwanted fingers on his flesh, he pretended his was somewhere else, sitting beside Annie on the beach.

In the shower, scrubbing at his skin until it burned bright pink, he remembered what Annie had felt like, beneath him, tasted like, beneath him. His skin felt wonderfully hot for the first time, her memories sustaining him like a light rain in the jungle.

He kept her necklace around his neck, an anchor to solid ground.

 

 

 

 

 

“So Finnick Odair,” Caesar Flickerman said, smile so wide Finnick wondered if it wasn’t trying to leap off his face, “any _special_ lady we should know about?”

He thought about knotted hair and the smell of the sea, her thin arms woven around his neck like a fishnet, her mouth stealing his air away.

He laughed. “Now, it wouldn’t be very gamely of me to give away that secret.” He winked. “But she is a _very_ special girl.” And stood before him like a stonewall.

The women of the Capitol swooned, and imagined it was them. Finnick Odair rushed home to the girl who sat on the beach.

 

 

 

 

 

The few that knew that Finnick spent most of his time in District Four with poor, mad Annie Cresta thought it was out of pity, or sympathy, out of the thread of camaraderie that connected all victors. Or they remembered how Annie’s grandmother used to clean his house, and how he had always had a soft spot for the Crestas, and it was done out of affection for the women she had been.

They were wrong.

The madness, as they termed it, was a facet of Annie Cresta. Just like the dark, twisting shame was a facet of him. Annie had never accepted him for anything less than what he was. Finnick would return the favor.

“Lo, Annie Cresa,” he murmured, and slipping a flower behind her ear. The summer sun made the sands burn white, and bounced along the thin curve of her calf.

He wondered if it was summer in the distance shores Annie had swam to.

 

 

 

 

 

She will come back, Finnick told himself. From his balcony he watched as Mags wound knots into Annie’s hair, twisting and turning them.

She will come back to me.

They were the tide and the shore, and the tide always came back.

 

 

 

 

 

When Annie’s victory tour was canceled, everyone knew why. _Poor, mad Annie Cresta_. It happened once or twice, the victor who couldn’t hack it. They were shuffled aside quietly and never spoken of.

On the holo-screen they recapped Annie’s lackluster—their words, not his—victory, super imposed her devastated face, her wild eyes, used that to mark her as unstable. _Unworthy_. Annie didn’t watch the program, content to dig her toes into the sand, but Finnick did. His kitchen was riddled with the proof of his viewing, dents in the walls from his fist, glass shards from the shattered window of his back door.

“Sometimes it’s best, just to let them think of you what they will. Use it like a shield,” Mags suggested. Mags was always the calm river to Finnick’s raging ocean. He wondered if he could have loved the bony woman who had given birth to him as much as he loved this woman, her gnarled hands and eyes sunken into her face.

_Use it like a shield_. Finnick knew how. The Capitol’s golden boy, they called him, and he plated himself in it. His charm was weaponized, and he wielded it as skilfully as his trident.

Mags was right. He was a patient man, but he needed her to come back. At the crux was the bitter truth that he needed Annie Cresta more than she needed him. She found her serenity in distant havens, in the far flung shores of her mind. He only found his peace when he was near her, and could hear the sound of her breathing.

 

 

 

 

 

One month after Annie’s canceled victory tour. They sat and watched as the storm rolled in, pregnant grey clouds hung low in the air, already allowing heavy, fat droplets of water to splash onto the water miles out. Wind kicked sand up across their skin, gritty and harsh.

Finnick watched, knees drawn up. Annie was looking at the sand, legs splayed out. He was going to the Capitol tomorrow, had explained it to her, though she hadn’t acknowledged him, had only sat at the kitchen, staring at her long fingers.

“She misses you when you go,” Mags had said.

She said it because she recognized the rare moment of weakness. “How can you know?” Finnick asked, unable to help himself. A year’s worth of insecurities and fears hung around his neck like a noose.

“A woman knows.”

He felt two fingers poke at his neck, and curl around a loose lock of his hair, coiling close to his hair. He stiffened, held his breath, didn’t dare move.

The storm rolled in, the waves crashing noisily against the shore.

“Hello, Finnick Odair.” Her voice was soft, and yet he could not hear the sound of the maelstrom over it. It was the only sound that could reach his ears.

He buried his head into his knees, shoulders rolling like he was crying. A hiccup escaped him, messy and wet. “Lo, Annie Cresta.”

Heavy raindrops splashed onto his back, plastering his shirt to his skin, hiding the salty evidence of his tears.

Annie’s arms came up and wrapped around his shoulders, her face in his hair, and they held each other tightly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. well here we are  
> 2\. yes i know i know  
> 3\. but it's finished i finished surprise  
> 4\. ah i'm not sure what else to say  
> 5\. happy hunger games!

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. so hunger games
> 
> 2\. so finnick odair
> 
> 3\. so annie cresta
> 
> 4\. so i'll get back to you when everything stops hurting


End file.
